Now David Remnick has changed his mind and canceled the Bannon gig.

There are many ways for a publication like ours to do its job: investigative reporting; pointed, well-argued opinion pieces; Profiles; reporting from all over the country and around the world; radio and video interviews; even live interviews. At the same time, many of our readers, including some colleagues, have said that the Festival is different, a different kind of forum. It’s also true that we pay an honorarium, that we pay for travel and lodging. (Which does not happen, of course, when we interview someone for an article or for the radio.) I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns. I’ve thought this through and talked to colleagues––and I’ve re-considered. I’ve changed my mind. There is a better way to do this. Our writers have interviewed Steve Bannon for The New Yorker before, and if the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.

–––David Remnick

So that was interesting.

Hmmm this seems pretty nuts: Steve Bannon Headlines New Yorker Festival.

Readers of The New Yorker prize the magazine for its wide-ranging collection of perspectives. From Oct. 5 to 7, The New Yorker Festival, now in its 19th year, will bring some of these voices to venues around New York City.

Political figures feature prominently in this year’s lineup, which includes Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, who will be interviewed by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, a frequent critic of the administration.

“I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Mr. Remnick said in a phone interview.

And of giving even more publicity and platform space to his poisonous “opinions.”

You know who else gots lots and lots of free publicity and attention and platform space from the mainstream media? Donald Trump. Hey maybe Steve Bannon will be the next president; that would be exciting.
Reactions are not universally ecstatic.

For anyone who wonders what normalization of bigotry looks like, please look no further than Steve Bannon being invited by both @TheEconomist & @NewYorker to their respective events in #NYC a few weeks apart. https://t.co/u0TDfCYrQ1

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) September 3, 2018

The ⁦@NewYorker⁩ gives its most visible platform to a man who unrepentantly promotes propaganda calling for ethnic cleansing. This is equivalent to putting onstage a man who recommends everyone read Mein Kampf & letting him promote his new company. https://t.co/6Rub6T1lzU

— anildash.com (@anildash) September 3, 2018

I love working for @NewYorker, but I'm beyond appalled by this: https://t.co/WlZdsBpF1R I have already made that very clear to David Remnick. You can, too: themail@newyorker.com

— Kathryn Schulz (@kathrynschulz) September 3, 2018

If Steve Bannon is at the New Yorker festival I am out. I will not take part in an event that normalizes hate. I hope the @NewYorker will do the right thing and cancel the Steve Bannon event. Maybe they should read their own reporting about his ideology.

— Judd Apatow 🇺🇦 (@JuddApatow) September 3, 2018

Can’t fathom a justification for this. He isn’t in government. He isn’t leading a fringe website anymore. He isn’t interesting. He’s a crank who’s trying (and since Trump, largely failing) to get majority white countries to elect bigots. https://t.co/Qz0NxumU9t

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) September 3, 2018

I was thinking along similar signs when I saw the headline. Why on earth? He’s not a public intellectual or an interesting writer or a thoughtful observer, so why is The New Yorker even interested in him? Stephen Miller is at least still there, still pulling the levers. Bannon is just a random crank with poisonous racist views, so why amplify and normalize them?

Commenter Kalyani alerted us to another massacre in Burma, this time by the Rohingya rather than to them. There’s nothing surprising in that, of course – no magic law makes the victims of massacres, let alone members of the category of people targeted for massacres, perfect.

Amnesty International reported last May 22:

A Rohingya armed group brandishing guns and swords is responsible for at least one, and potentially a second, massacre of up to 99 Hindu women, men, and children as well as additional unlawful killings and abductions of Hindu villagers in August 2017, Amnesty International revealed today after carrying out a detailed investigation inside Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

Based on dozens of interviews conducted there and across the border in Bangladesh, as well as photographic evidence analyzed by forensic pathologists, the organization revealed how Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) fighters sowed fear among Hindus and other ethnic communities with these brutal attacks.

…

At around 8am on 25 August 2017, ARSA attacked the Hindu community in the village of Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik, in a cluster of villages known as Kha Maung Seik in northern Maungdaw Township. At the time of the attack, the Hindu villagers lived in close proximity to Rohingya villagers, who are predominantly Muslim. Rakhine villagers, who are predominantly Buddhist, also lived in the same area.

Armed men dressed in black and local Rohingya villagers in plain clothes rounded up dozens of Hindu women, men and children. They robbed, bound, and blindfolded them before marching them to the outskirts of the village, where they separated the men from the women and young children. A few hours later, the ARSA fighters killed 53 of the Hindus, execution-style, starting with the men.

Eight Hindu women and eight of their children were abducted and spared, after ARSA fighters forced the women to agree to “convert” to Islam. The survivors were forced to flee with the fighters to Bangladesh several days later, before being repatriated to Myanmar in October 2017 with the support of the Bangladeshi and Myanmar authorities.

Bina Bala, a 22-year-old woman who survived the massacre, told Amnesty International:

“[The men] held knives and long iron rods. They tied our hands behind our backs and blindfolded us. I asked what they were doing. One of them replied, ‘You and Rakhine are the same, you have a different religion, you can’t live here. He spoke the [Rohingya] language. They asked what belongings we had, then they beat us. Eventually I gave them my gold and money.”

Then Burma’s military took revenge.

Reuters has a detailed story on the framing of the two Reuters reporters in Burma.

Time and again, Myanmar’s government appeared at risk of blowing its prosecution of two young journalists who had exposed a massacre of 10 Muslim men and implicated security forces in the killings.

On April 20, a prosecution witness revealed in pre-trial hearings that police planted military documents on Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo in order to frame them for violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. That admission drew gasps from the courtroom.

A police officer told the court that he burned notes he made at the time of the reporters’ arrest, but didn’t explain why. Several prosecution witnesses contradicted the police account of where the arrests took place. A police major conceded the “secret” information allegedly found on the reporters wasn’t actually a secret.

And outside the courtroom, military officials even admitted that the killings had indeed taken place.

But never mind all that –

On Monday, after 39 court appearances and 265 days of imprisonment, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were found guilty of breaching the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Yangon northern district judge Ye Lwin ruled that the two reporters had breached the secrets act when they collected and obtained confidential documents. Delivering his verdict in the small courtroom, he said it had been found that “confidential documents” discovered on the two would have been useful “to enemies of the state and terrorist organizations.”

If that’s the criterion it probably covers all journalists.

A week before the ruling, United Nations investigators said in a report that Myanmar’s military had carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Muslim Rohingya with “genocidal intent,” and that the commander-in-chief and five generals should be punished. The report also accused the government of Aung San Suu Kyi of contributing to “the commission of atrocity crimes” by failing to shield minorities from crimes against humanity and war crimes. Myanmar has rejected the findings.

Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader who spent some 15 years under house arrest during the junta era, has made few public statements about the case. In a rare comment in June, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate told Japanese broadcaster NHK that the reporters weren’t arrested for covering the violence in western Myanmar. “They were arrested because they broke the Official Secrets Act,” she said.

Some Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

At the time of their arrest in December, Wa Lone, now 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, now 28, were working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim villagers during an army crackdown in Rakhine State in the west of the country. The violence has sent more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh, where they now live in vast refugee camps.

…

Reuters published its investigation into the massacre on Feb. 8. An account of the killing of eight men and two high school students in September in the village of Inn Din, the report prompted international demands for a credible probe into the wider bloodshed in Rakhine.

The story and its accompanying photographs provided the first independent confirmation of what took place at Inn Din. Two of the photos obtained by the reporters show the men kneeling, in one with their hands behind their necks and in a second with their hands tied behind their backs. A third picture shows their bodies, some apparently with bullet wounds, others with gashes, in a blood-stained, shallow grave.

Reuters includes the first photo in the story.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested on the evening of Dec. 12. During hours of testimony in July, they described that night and the interrogations that followed. They told the court that their heads were covered with black hoods when they were transported to a police interrogation site. They testified they were deprived of sleep for three days during their grillings. At one point, Kyaw Soe Oo said, he was punished and made to kneel on the floor for at least three hours. A police witness denied that the reporters were deprived of sleep and that Kyaw Soe Oo was forced to kneel.

Describing the night of their arrest, Wa Lone said he and Kyaw Soe Oo were detained almost immediately after being handed some documents at a restaurant by a police lance corporal he had been trying to interview for the massacre story. The policeman had invited Wa Lone to meet and Kyaw Soe Oo accompanied him, Wa Lone testified.

When the two reporters exited the restaurant, they were grabbed by men in plain clothes, handcuffed and shoved into separate vehicles, they both testified. As they were driven to a police station, Wa Lone recalled in court, a man who appeared to be in charge called a senior officer and told him: “We’ve got them, sir.”

Wa Lone told the court that their interrogation was about their reporting, not the documents.

At one point, Wa Lone testified, the police chastised him for reporting on the Rohingya. “You are both Buddhists. Why are you writing about ‘kalars’ at a time like this? They aren’t citizens,” Wa Lone recalled being told. ‘Kalar’ is a slur widely used in Myanmar to describe Muslims, especially Rohingya and people of South Asian origin.

Of course. Can’t kill them if there isn’t a derogatory word for them.

Robert Reich points out the well known fact that most people are not doing well in this economy and that there’s a huge gap between the rich and everyone else. Then he points out the not quite so well known consequence.

Last year, about 40 percent of American families struggled to meet at least one basic need – food, health care, housing or utilities, according to an Urban Institute survey. 

All of which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had in 2008, and possibly as bad as 1929.

Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce. Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over.

If you insist on paying your workers a tiny wage then they’re not going to be able to buy your product, so then what, smart boss?

The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

These are close to the peaks of 1928 and 2007.

The U.S. economy crashes when it becomes too top heavy because the economy depends on consumer spending to keep it going, yet the rich don’t spend nearly as much of their income as the middle class and the poor.

For a time, the middle class and poor can keep the economy going nonetheless by borrowing. But, as in 1929 and 2008, debt bubbles eventually burst.

I replied to Reich’s tweet sharing this post, before reading the post, “you mean we can’t just keep piling up debt forever??”

After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost wages – Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World War II.

After the 2008 crash, the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages.

That’s for sure. The Democratic party turned its back on that idea long ago.

Trump and his Republican enablers are now reversing regulations put in place to stop Wall Street’s excessively risky lending.

But Trump’s real contributions to the next crash are his sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, rollback of overtime pay, burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid – all of which put more stress on the paychecks of most Americans.

Yup. I’ve been saying it all along – it’s all about shoving more more more money to the rich, and grabbing everything away from everyone else.

Brace yourselves for the crash.

The Des Moines Register has a guest column by Rob Tibbetts, father of Molly Tibbetts, the University of Iowa student who was murdered and hidden in a corn field last month.

Ten days ago, we learned that Mollie would not be coming home. Shattered, my family set out tocelebrate Mollie’s extraordinary life and chose to share our sorrow in private. At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas. We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.

Sadly, others have ignored our request. They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome. But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family and is, to quote Donald Trump Jr., “heartless” and “despicable.”

…

The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community [than] white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind. This person will receive a fair trial, as it should be. If convicted, he will face the consequences society has set. Beyond that, he deserves no more attention.

To the Hispanic community, my family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you’ve been beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody. And yes, we love your food.

My stepdaughter, whom Mollie loved so dearly, is Latina. Her sons — Mollie’s cherished nephews and my grandchildren — are Latino. That means I am Hispanic. I am African. I am Asian. I am European. My blood runs from every corner of the Earth because I am American. As an American, I have one tenet: to respect every citizen of the world and actively engage in the ongoing pursuit to form a more perfect union.

Which is better, really? Which is more conducive to being a decent person with a humane outlook – programmatic hatred of specified Other groups of people, or respect for every citizen of the world? The answer is obvious.

This helpfully isolates one point of contention.

https://twitter.com/ILoveUTigerLily/status/1036185866018811906

No. Really not. Everyone has a sex, a complicated one in the case of trans-sexual people. “Gender identity” is a neologism and what it names is just an idea about the self. It’s a particular, local, time-specific, constructed, contentious, culture-bound idea about the self, and one which not everyone signs up to, to put it mildly.

You might as well say everyone has a height identity or a species identity or an age identity. You might as well but you wouldn’t, because “activists” have not yet declared that that is 1. a thing and 2. mandatory for all. But they have declared that about “gender identity,” and that’s a pity, because it’s not true.

About those racist robo-calls in Florida…

If nothing else, the minute-long audio clip is a clear sign of how quickly racism — subtle in some cases, overt in others — has entered the contest to determine who will lead Florida.

“Well hello there,” the call begins as the sounds of drums and monkeys can be heard in the background, according to the New York Times. “I is Andrew Gillum.”

“We Negroes . . . done made mud huts while white folk waste a bunch of time making their home out of wood an stone.”

…

A disclaimer at the end of the robo-call says it was produced by the Road to Power, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group based in Idaho. The Southern Poverty Law Center has noted a recent rise in robo-calls across the country, describing them as a “new, high-tech, computer-delivered brand of hate,” according to the Times.

The Road to Power is also the group behind the most unsubtle attempt to turn the killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa into anti-immigration policy and a 2018 campaign talking point.

…

The suspect, Cristhian Rivera, is an undocumented immigrant who worked on a dairy farm, and conservatives said Tibbetts’s death highlights the need for stronger immigration laws and even a wall on the southern border. Tibbetts’s family has pushed back against that argument, with her father speaking favorably of the local Hispanic community.

“If after her life has now been brutally stolen from her, she could be brought back to life for just one moment and asked what do you think now, Mollie Tibbetts would say, ‘Kill them all.’ ” an Iowa robo-call says. “Well, we don’t have to kill them all, but we do have to deport them all. The Aztec hybrids known as mestizos are low IQ, bottom feeding savages and is why the country they infest are crime-ridden failures.”

According to the Des Moines Register, the man producing the robo-calls is named Scott Rhodes, of Sandpoint, Idaho. He has been linked to similar campaigns in California, Alexandria, Va., and Charlottesville.

I don’t know what Idaho ever did to become the headquarters for white supremacists.

Look, her tit was right there, what was he supposed to do, not grab it? But he said he was sorry anyway, just in case.

The bishop who led Aretha Franklin’s funeral has apologised to Ariana Grande after being accused of groping her on stage.

Or, in fact, after groping her on stage.

The preacher said he hugged all artists, male or female, during the ceremony commemorating the Queen of Soul.

But viewers began posting images from the service when Ariana got up to sing Aretha’s song (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

https://twitter.com/ArianaToday/status/1035659644319014912

I don’t care what you think about Ariana Grande, her music or her dress. This is wrong. That bishop’s hand should not be on her breast: I just saw this because I’ve been working and not watching https://t.co/ixVhgYBJTN

— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) September 1, 2018

I’m not sure I think his apology was entirely sincere.

Bloomberg on the drought:

The sweltering summer turned lush fields brown and led to shortages of fodder for the country’s millions of cows. Months of drought and heat have also caused problems across the European Union, the top milk exporter. Farmers from Ireland to Germany have had to cull herds or stop milking months early.

For the EU’s $12 billion dairy industry, parched fields have raised animal-feed costs, squeezing farmers’ profits. Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority expects dairy farms to earn half as much as last year. The feed situation could become critical and milk production may drop in the coming months, according to Arla Foods, the Nordic region’s biggest dairy company.

“In July, we brought in grass that should have been for winter feeding,” said Pat McCormack, who has 100 dairy cows in Ireland’s County Tipperary, where he’s worked for 21 years. “For a farmer with no grass, no silage, no money and kids going to college, it’s a big mental challenge.”

…

In Ireland, snow at the start of the year soaked fields so much that farmers began dipping into fodder reserves before the drought then hurt grass growth, causing them to use up next winter’s supplies this summer. Some have had to buy feed at extra cost with no crops of their own left to feed cattle.

Those who couldn’t afford to do that have culled herds. Since June, about 16 percent more cows than last year have been slaughtered weekly, according to Ireland’s agriculture department. In Germany, culling is up as much as 50 percent from a year earlier, farmer’s group DBV estimates.

It’s grim.

Tiggerthewing has been telling us about the drought in Ireland, so let’s read more:

Ireland has been listed as one of the countries “most significantly” impacted by drought conditions over the summer months, according to a newly-published European Drought Observatory (EDO) report.

Comparing results for August to a previous assessment at the end of June, the report – carried out by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) – found that the overall situation “worsened” over Scandinavia, and substantially over Ireland and the UK.

…

Concerning agriculture, the report highlights that in the drought-affected zones, some national governments are discussing aid to farmers amid damage claims.

In addition, the livestock sector in many member states is also affected due to a lack of fodder.

The report states that yield for winter and spring cereals were confirmed as “seriously reduced” by the dry and hot weather that followed up in July.

Last month, a bulletin from the JRC on winter crop yield forecasts for Europe reported that water stress, associated with exceptionally dry and warmer-than-usual conditions, affected the flowering and/or grain filling of winter crops and spring cereals in large regions of northern central and northern Europe.

Winter and spring cereal yield forecasts were revised downwards in practically all northern and central European countries – including major producers Germany and Poland.

Not cheerful.

Oh not this again.

Thousands of Islamists have set off on a protest march in Pakistan to demand Imran Khan’s new government sever diplomatic ties with the Netherlands over a “blasphemous” cartoon competition.

The march, organised by Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), a political party dedicated to the punishment of blasphemy, presents the first major test of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration. Last year, a similar protest by the TLP shut down the capital, Islamabad, for almost a month.

In June, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam MP who leads the Netherlands’ second largest party and has been found guilty of inciting hatred, invited submissions of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, which Islam forbids. The $10,000 (£7,700) competition is due to open in November, with 200 entries so far.

That phrase “which Islam forbids” is meaningless. Islam isn’t the boss of us, so it can forbid until it’s blue in the face but we don’t have to obey. In reality even Muslims don’t have to obey, it’s just that some of them choose to be under its domination, and others don’t exactly choose to be but aren’t really free not to be. The Netherlands, at any rate, in no way has to pay any attention to what Islam forbids, and even if it did, it couldn’t extend that to Geert Wilders, unless it passed some very repressive laws.

People in Pakistan can march up and march down, but they can’t stop people in the Netherlands drawing cartoons, nor should they be able to.

Khadim Rizvi, the firebrand cleric who founded the TLP, said that condemnation of the contest by the Pakistani government was not enough and “only jihad” was the solution.

Before Pakistan’s general election last month, Rizvi said if he had the power he would order a nuclear strike against the Netherlands if its government allowed the competition to go ahead.

The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, has termed the event “disrespectful” but defended the right to hold it on the grounds of freedom of expression.

On Monday, Pakistan’s senate passed a resolution condemning the competition and Khan vowed to take up the issue at the UN general assembly in September. He said Islamic countries should cooperate to create laws against blasphemy similar to those against Holocaust denial in European countries.

“If they [western countries] feel pained discussing the Holocaust, why haven’t we been able to convey to the west how much we feel pained when they do blasphemous things against Islam and our beloved Holy Prophet, peace be upon him?” said Khan.

Because it’s not the same thing, obviously. The genocide of millions of people is not the same thing, or category of thing, as a Special Feeling about a religious figure. That’s why.

Oh and about that warming Arctic Ocean?

The Arctic is in hot water, literally, following the discovery that heat has been accumulating rapidly in a salty layer of the Arctic Ocean 50 metres down. Currently, it’s being held at that depth by a less dense layer of freshwater overhead, but if the two layers start to mix it could melt all seasonal sea ice, accelerating the already-rapid loss of polar ice cover.

Researchers discovered the heat time-bomb after analysing publicly available data on ice cover, and at different depths on sea temperature, heat content and saltiness over the past three decades. The data was gathered around the Canadian Basin, a major basin of the Arctic Ocean fed by waters from the North Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia.

Over this timespan, the heat content of the salty layer doubled, from 200 to 400 million joules per square metre, enough to reduce overall Arctic ice thickness by 80 centimetres.

The root cause is global warming, which has seen temperatures in the Arctic rise by 2 degrees from pre-industrial levels–twice the global average—leading to record-low sea ice coverage. The researchers found that with sea ice retreating, heat absorption by exposed surface waters has increased fivefold in 30 years, mainly from direct sunlight, which no longer gets reflected by ice.

5 x in 30 years…that seems like a lot in a little.

Winds are pushing the waters around now that there’s no ice in the way, and winds could cause the two layers to mix.

Not good.

Colleen Flaherty at IHE on the campaign to delegitimize Lisa Littman’s study in PLOS ONE.

Brown University and PLOS ONE have distanced themselves from a controversial, peer-reviewed published study on “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” or gender identity issues that present not early and over a lifetime but quickly, in teenagers and young adults. The study, which has been criticized by transgender activists and allies as promoting the idea that being trans is a fad, and as relying on an unsound methodology, was based on anonymous survey responses from about 250 parents of (primarily female) teens and young adults who’d abruptly expressed gender dysphoria.

It’s almost funny that there’s outrage at the idea that being trans is a fad. Really? At the very same time as you’re engaged in trying to enforce the fad by shouting down anyone who asks questions? How, in this climate, could being trans not be a fad? It could certainly be other things too; it could be both a fad and a real experience or syndrome or whatever you want to call it; but at this point it can hardly escape being a fad too. It’s hyped like mad, it’s treated as sacred, it’s taboo, it’s sanctified, it’s retroactively diagnosed (Elizabeth Tudor? didn’t know that, didja!), it’s celebrated and defended and promoted all over social media. An adolescent would have to be superhuman not to be at least curious.

[T]he study also raised questions about whether social factors, rather than biological ones, influenced the young adults’ trans identities. It found that many young adults had requested and been offered medical interventions at the time of coming out, with possible lasting implications for their fertility and health, and that most doctors who evaluated these young adults didn’t ask questions about mental health, trauma or other possible reasons for sudden gender dysphoria.

The doctors are subject to social contagion too, though not as powerfully as adolescents. But the dogma is that if X says “I am trans” then that’s the end of the matter – it’s “transphobic” to wait and see.

A Brown news release about the study posted last week quoted its author, Lisa Littman, an assistant professor of the practice of behavioral and social sciences at the university, as saying, “This kind of descriptive study is important because it defines a group and raises questions for more research. One of the main conclusions is that more research needs to be done.” But Brown removed the story from its website this week, replacing it with an open letter from Bess H. Marcus, dean of public health, saying, “In light of questions raised about research design and data collection related to the study on ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria,’ the university determined that removing the article from news distribution is the most responsible course of action.”

Questions raised by whom?

By @SadistHailey.

thank you for bringing this to our attention. We take any concerns raised to us seriously and are already in the process of investigating these.

— PLOS ONE (@PLOSONE) August 24, 2018

Really. The person (or persons) managing the PLOS ONE Twitter account responded in all seriousness to that tweet from that “activist,” and then PLOS ONE removed the article. [My mistake.]

Marcus of course is the one who wrote that “The School of Public Health has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community,” as I pointed out a couple of days ago. You know, Gwyneth Paltrow has perspectives too – shouldn’t Brown’s School of Public Health be protecting her perspectives also, by letting her write an article promoting jade eggs up the vagina? If it’s one set of perspectives it should be all of them, no? How about anti-vax perspectives? How about homeopathic asthma treatment perspectives? Won’t somebody please think of the perspectives?

While the “spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence, Marcus said, “we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work. This process includes acknowledging and considering the perspectives of those who criticize our research methods and conclusions and working to improve future research to address these limitations and better serve public health.”

So then I guess that is what she means – all perspectives welcome, including on public health research. Never mind evidence and statistics, just collect all the perspectives, put them in a box, shake it hard, and then use the soup that results.

An additional university statement on the page cites PLOS ONE’s social media statement about the study.  The journal has said it’s “aware of the reader concerns raised on the study’s content and methodology. We take all concerns raised about publications in the journal very seriously, and are following up on these per our policy” and other international publication ethics guidelines.

They’re aware of the concerns because random people on Twitter @ed them. Much science, very seriously.

Littman, the study’s author, declined comment on Brown’s or PLOS ONE’s actions. But she said she stood by her methodology. “My study is a descriptive study,” she said via email. “And like all descriptive studies there are limitations which are acknowledged. And although descriptive studies may be one of the less robust study designs they play an important role in the scientific literature primarily because they are a first description of a new condition or population and they make it possible to conduct additional, more rigorous research.”

She added, “When analyzing the methodology of my paper, it should be done in the context of other descriptive studies, not compared to studies employing other research designs. The methodology in my study is consistent with methodologies that have been used in other descriptive research and it has similar strengths and weaknesses, which I acknowledge in the paper.”

Well yes, but some activists made a stink on Twitter, so that settles it.

New editor of student philosophy journal announces no tolerance policy for questioning of pet ideology.

https://twitter.com/latesebastian/status/1035561285918842881

Since the label “TERFs” is used to bully and ostracize women who dispute parts of the rapidly evolving but nevertheless mandatory dogma of trans activism, the new editor of the student philosophy journal is congratulating himself on a policy of not tolerating analysis of a new and ever-changing political dogma that is noisily and explicitly hostile to feminism and, in practice, to women in general.